I’m looking into a few different chat servers, probably just for family on my tailnet.
I like the idea that simplex allows video chat. My server is a repurposed optiplex 3060so I think it should be able to handle it. Is anyone doing this? Do you think it’s worth it?
Should I be considering other options like XMPP?
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XMPP, but also Delta Chat! The Webxdc apps for Delta work in XMPP client Cheogram despite there being no cross-compatibility between the networks. It can access ordinary email servers so long as they were not set up maliciously (Apple, M$, Gmail, etc). It can do a couple things XMPP cannot, but it’s not suitable for anyone outside close friends and family. I basically only use it for email, automation, and other personal matters. XMPP is for general use and can replace Discord. The Movim project looks very cool they have a community here also join their XMPP chat. Cheogram services can connect to the regular phone network.
If you like SimpleX, you can host a server and configure your clients to use that. You don’t use only your server though, so I don’t know if this will satisfy your requirements.
Why not “only”?
Because at least when you use their private routing feature messages go: sender -> custom sender’s server -> custom receiver’s server -> receiver
So unless sender and receiver are configured to use servers under your control, there will be at least one foreign server involved.
To be fair I’m not sure how that works, when you don’t use their private routing feature.
Oh yeah sorry I thought that both ends configured custom self hosted servers. But yeah in the “normal” case the self hosted server is “only” contributing to the network
matrix using smth like tuwunel or xmpp using prosody could intrest you if you want smth more video zoom only esc you can look into jitsi
Every one always says XMPP and there were a lot of recommendations for ejabberd. I tried this recently and it was a total disaster, I do not have a working chat server. If I followed the docker instructions the server would just crash with no details of what went wrong. Where it should have been creating a default server config file it was instead creating a directory with the wrong permissions then promptly crashing. I tried following their documentation but after about 6 hours of messing about and adding more and more I still couldn’t get a client to login to it. I have no idea how to make this work.
So whatever the solution ultimately is I can’t recommend Ejabberd.